Watching the Watchmen: Part 2

by James Bradley on March 11, 2009

On the weekend I linked to the wonderful credit sequence of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Now io9.com are offering a blow by blow guide to the many visual gags and references contained in the credits. It makes delightful reading, though I also suspect the attention to detail the article unpacks, and its deliberate echoing of the visually encoded and layered complexities of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original graphic novel is one of the qualities which makes the film itself such an oddly enervating experience.

*Spoiler alert* The opening credits were indeed brilliant. I loved The Comedian on the grassy knoll and Warhol & Capote in the Factory. I wish the rest of the movie had tackled the flawed original so inventively.
I liked most things about the film, except some of the overly-ironic music, but I’m still trying to work out why I can’t love either it or the book. I think in the end it’s because story is consistently subservient to metaphor. My suspension of disbelief is suspended when cleverness comes at the expense of character and plot (Dr M’s inability to spot Ozymandias’ scheme and Ozzy’s failure to kill Rorschach early being two of the most obvious examples in a story brim-full of ridiculous inconsistencies).
Character should drive story, not metaphor. I guess that’s the problem I have with most comic-book universes, and for that matter ‘Kavalier & Clay’, too.
Four stars from me, Margaret.

There is something oddly nothing about the film as a whole isn’t there? It’s beautiful, and incredibly detailed, and slavishly faithful to the original, but it’s rather joyless as well, and paceless, and basically a bit dumb. Partly it’s that as so often happens with transposition between media, what mattered in the original, that thing it was about in some deep sense, seems to have fallen away, and what you’re left with is somehow empty at its heart. And the Cold War stuff seems so far away now it’s difficult to connect to it.